[ RadSafe ] Re: [DailyBrief] Wash Post - U.S. Called Unprepared ForNuclear Terrorism

[Jaro]

Gerry Blackwood wrote :

"Security experts consider a terrorist nuclear strike highly unlikely
because of the difficulty in obtaining fissionable material and constructing
a bomb."

What security experts? I hate it when these morons write crap like this.
Please identify the security experts......
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

OK :


International Experts Play Down Threat Of Terrorists Acquiring WMD's
Helsinki (AFP) Apr 14, 2005
Terrorist groups and organizations have neither the capacity nor the
ambition to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), former UN chief
weapons inspector Hans Blix, and other experts said at a conference in
Helsinki last Thursday.
"I'm as concerned about global warming and its long term effects" as about
the immediate threat of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction,
said Blix, a former Swedish diplomat who was charged with searching for such
weapons ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

"Support and coordination from states would be needed for terrorists to
produce WMDs," he insisted, speaking at a conference here entitled "WMD
terrorism: how scared should we be?".

Blix acknowledged however that "there is a small but not zero risk" of
terrorists laying their hands on weapons of mass destruction, and called for
more preventive measures.
"Material and technology are now widespread and an ability to create WMDs is
also greater," he said.

John Parachini, a political analyst with the California-based Rand
Corporation, agreed that the current threat of terrorists gaining access to
such weapons had perhaps been exaggerated.
"WMDs are not easy to produce," he said, adding that "the mix of terrorism
and WMDs becomes really dangerous if a group or groups form a sort of
connection with a state and get knowledge from states how to produce WMDs".

"WMDs used by Al-Qaeda is much further off than we think," agreed Thomas
Sanderson of the Strategic and International Studies' Transnational Threats
Project.

He cautioned however that the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and
2001 showed that "the intention of terrorist groups to cause major damage is
there".

"You don't need to kill thousands of people in order to cause a terrible
effect on a country, as anthrax showed," he added, referring to a scare soon
after the 2001 attacks.

According to Parachini, there have been only four known cases in recent
history of non-state actors using non-conventional weapons to wreak havoc:
the Rajneeshee sect's salmonella poisoning of an Oregon town in 1984, the
chlorine attack on the Sri Lankan air force carried out by the Tamil Tigers
in 1990, the Aum sect's release of deadly sarin gas on a Tokyo subway train
in 1995 and finally the deadly anthrax letters, believed to be of domestic
origin, that terrorized the United States in 2001.
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 Jaro
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